False choice, mon frere. Investors are hoping for a negotiated solution that will be better than both "something" and "nothing". More power to them.
to be fair, this isn't exactly high stakes. Some business drama over a third tier Linux distro that most people have never heard of. If the company goes under then somebody else will just run with the source code, just like Mandriva was born from mandrake code.

Mandriva is not 3rd tier. That is Mandrake which goes 98 and connectiva to 95. Connectiva was part of the whole Open Linux initiative which history had turned out differently could have been the 1st tier distribution.

Mandriva wasn't born from Mandrake code, Mandrake acquired other distribution companies like Lycos and added their stuff.

If you ask the shareholders, yes, but if you ask the "fund manager" no, s/he prefers you to keep junk papers, as long as you have somehow the illusion that it just might potentially have some value sometimes, so that you keep paying the manager to "handle" these funds...

No, the manager of an existing investment fund fears that dilution will make him redundant, he repeatedly blocked any "way out" for Mandriva, his only interest is to keep being paid a yearly percentage of the "nominal value" of the investment for doing absolutely nothing useful.

It is a general problem of our current brand of financial capitalism that the investor have in practice no direct contact nor real interest in the companies they invest in.The decision makers ware the investment fund manager, who man

There is no law, but thats not the point - if the original investor paid $X for Y% ownership of the company through share issuances, and now the company is diluting that Y% ownership to Y/2% ownership, then the company is effectively stealing from the original investor and he has a right to challenge that.

There is no right to profit, but there is a right to not be stolen from - if it takes a threat to the existence to the company to stop it, then that sounds fair.

There is no law, but thats not the point - if the original investor paid $X for Y% ownership of the company through share issuances, and now the company is diluting that Y% ownership to Y/2% ownership, then the company is effectively stealing from the original investor and he has a right to challenge that.

There is no right to profit, but there is a right to not be stolen from - if it takes a threat to the existence to the company to stop it, then that sounds fair.

An influx of cash does not dilute an investment. For example, if you own 50% of a company that is worth a dollar, you have an investment worth 50 cents. If I invest a dollar in the company, it is now worth $2 and you still have a 50 cent investment. No dilution has ooccurred, your original investment value is the same even if it's a smaller fraction of the total. No one is stealing anything from anybody, since their original investment is still there. Now, they certainly have the right to decide if they wan

Your point is wrong, because my original 50% ownership entitles me to 50% of the company, regardless of worth - so if you invest $1 to make the companies worth $2, then my share becomes $1.

Devaluing my ownership is what is in question here - and the ownership stands completely apart from company worth. Just because the company suddenly becomes twice as rich doesn't mean my ownership devalues of its own accord.

There are two ways for the investment to be made - as a fixed return, or by taking an ownership in

Your point is wrong, because my original 50% ownership entitles me to 50% of the company, regardless of worth - so if you invest $1 to make the companies worth $2, then my share becomes $1.

No, because your original 50 cents investment entitled you to 50% of the company at the time it was made. If the rest of the shareholders hold sufficient power to override your will and accept more investment, your percentage of ownership will drop (and your investment stays valued at 50 cents). To do it otherwise would

This is rubbish. Do you think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and all the rest got rich by selling their stakes for the same amount they paid for them initially? Bullshit, they owned a certain percentage of the startups that became more valuable as the company valuations rose.

This is rubbish. Do you think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and all the rest got rich by selling their stakes for the same amount they paid for them initially? Bullshit, they owned a certain percentage of the startups that became more valuable as the company valuations rose.

That's nice, except your comment has nothing to do with the discussion.

It does reduce if you want to leverage your percentage by forcing the company to go belly up and then greedily acquiring the remaining bits on the cheap and relaunching. So what if a bunch if people get fired in the interim, screw em, they didn't make you enough money so they deserve it. As for the other investors mwahaha.

The shenanigans and manipulations that go on with corporations can be mind blowing. Often those executives and investors claim one thing when their intent is something different all tog

Same here. In addition to being user friendly, it was, in my opinion, rock solid stable. Mandrake is what got me using Linux not just playing with it. It was never right at the cutting edge; always one back from the latest release of KDE or Gnome or what have you. I stuck with it through the change to Mandriva and still use it on a couple of machines. I'll miss it if it folds.

Started with 7.0 myself in 2000. There were a couple of times when they left my old equipment behind (during one such time I used OpenSUSE), but once I had equipment that was more up-to-date I went back to Mandriva.

(For those asking about the name, Mandrake merged with the Brazilian distro Connectiva and combined the names to get Mandriva.)

Mind you, the latest version again doesn't work on my equipment, but Mageia does, so you know where I am.

Mandrake has a tradition of problems, basically since they were Mandrake. Back then, they used to be the more desktop friendly redhat. Being French, they had good i18n support before redhat did, switched to utf early one, provided international packages, and also multimedia. But at that time their community was registered users only, if you didn't have the current version purchased: no soup for you.

Mandrake was always reluctant to share documentation. As a result, they cut themselves off from the larger community. Good innovations like a metapackager, that got users out of rpm-dependency hell long before redhat moved in that direction, or also mandrakes system of setting security level never made it back to a wider audience.

Mandrake has a tradition of problems, basically since they were Mandrake. Back then, they used to be the more desktop friendly redhat. Being French, they had good i18n support before redhat did, switched to utf early one, provided international packages, and also multimedia. But at that time their community was registered users only, if you didn't have the current version purchased: no soup for you.

Mandrake was always reluctant to share documentation. As a result, they cut themselves off from the larger community. Good innovations like a metapackager, that got users out of rpm-dependency hell long before redhat moved in that direction, or also mandrakes system of setting security level never made it back to a wider audience.

I worked on the docs until the 8.x releases, IIRC. They wanted everything done in DocBook or your could not participate.

The problems with wider adoption of urpmi, mcc and msec and other Mandriva utilities (including their installer) were that they were written in perl and the RedHat world used python. They would also get great ideas for some things and then never maintain them.

And they had a leader who was more interested in computer aided "learning centers" and squandered a good deal of their cash.

I still use Mandriva (stopped at 2010.2). I don't care for some of the folks at Mageia, so I'll be sad to see Mandriva go if it does (used it since 5.2).

Yes, technically Mandrake/Mandriva was always innovative. I especially liked the installer and the DrakX tools. System-config-whatever doesn't even come close, and it's been 10 years.

Financially they were always in terrible shape. First there was the investment or loan they had from I think an Americain investor. They controlled management, and decided to head into the directionm of education. The management didn't want that, they wanted to stay in de Linux distro business. That caused the loan/investment t

You realize that as awesome as Debian is, it's initial release was in 1996, whereas Red Hat's was in 1993, right?. Considering Mandrake was originally based off of it, I'd say that if anything's the grand-daddy - it's Red Hat.

THIS. I've been an AC here since before Caldera Linux existed. I believe, Debian is bar-none the most stable usable distro.It's what pulled me from BSD to Linux.

Um you realise Debian is also KFreeBSD right?

The only problem with Debian is the current influx of Ewebuntards (not saying you're one of them) flooding the lists and forums with stupidity and "demands". Suddenly it's a right to swear and be downright offensive while demanding that Unstable Gnome/XFCE or whatever DE they want - stay exactly as it was. Gnome3/KDE4/PulseAudio is evil, it's too hard - but we DEMAND it run on our phone/fondle slab/SandyBridge so we can update our bling on a daily basis - but IT

You just triggered a memory... Does anyone else recall Yggrasill? I remember buying the whole package... it came with a videotape explaining how to install it and a massive 10-lb phonebook of a manual called "The Gnu Testament". This must've been around 1995 or so. Good times.
Debian is along with Slackware indeed the granddaddy of 'em all. I use OpenSUSE now but sometimes wish I was on Debian every time another bug comes up. It may be a generation or two behind the curve, but it's tested and stable (no pu

Yep, and it was probably the first CD bootable "live" distribution that you could try before installing!Although we used slakware mostly at the time (to be able to make "small installs" on servers I loved it.

The only problem with Debian is the current influx of Ewebuntards (not saying you're one of them) flooding the lists and forums with stupidity and "demands". Suddenly it's a right to swear and be downright offensive while demanding (...)

Funny. I think this is the result of Ubuntu's Code of Conduct preventing education of the more obnoxious people on the Ubuntu users mailing list. While requiring contributers to be friendly to newbs was a good idea originally and probably contributed to a generally good atmosphere on the users list, when I left there had developed a subset of people who were endlessly demanding, annoying, stupid, and offensive, with no way left to reign them in. Every time you told them that it's enough now, some well-meani

Is KFreeBSD even ready? Where is it in comparison w/ FreeBSD? One thing I like about Debian is them doing different OSs - not just Linux, but also KFreeBSD and HURD. Wish they'd take up Minix as well @ some point.

If they were profitable, or even revenue neutral, this wouldn't be a problem.

I'm not saying anything bad about Mandriva, rather the summary who seems to blame the inability to get loans, whereas the inability to get loans is the natural way of the world. Eventually it happens to everyone.

Maybe they can get the paper work in to be too French to fail?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_video_game_policy [wikipedia.org]
A French re imagineering of Tux Racer using advanced ray tracing - then they can get into super computing tax breaks and be the next Bull.

there are a large number of profitable, and/or revenue neutral businesses that are closed all the time. why?

because profit and revenue are not the only things that matter. sometimes politics matters more. and sometimes someone thinks they can make 'more profit' for themselves by closing down a profitable company than by keeping it open.

The phrasing in that letter is kind of torturous and very flowery, and Google translate misses in a few spots.. (But does shockingly well over all.)

Here's a slightly cleaner translation (my own):

To the associates and directors of Bryan Garnier:Mr. Olivier Garnier De Falletans,In this letter, we wish to bring to your attention the extreme gravity of the situation which we believe ourselves, as employees of Mandriva, to be the victims.We are determined to no longer sit back and endure this situation passively.In less than four weeks, our company could be effectively forced to file for bankruptcy and cease all activities because its indispensable recapitilization has been two times prevented by Linlux SARL, and this even though Townarea Trading & Investment Ltd, our other majority shareholder, was inclined to support entirely the cost, an amount of 4,000,000 euro.Now, Linux SARL, an organization which seems to be under your control and that of Mr. Marc Goldberg, your employee and manager, had itself no financial obligation and therefore could not be but a beneficiary of this salvage operation.The refusal which was offered by Linlux SARL to all the propositions made during the general assemblies of September 30th and December 5th 2011 is and remains for us absolutely incomprehensible and absolutely unjustifiable.There are no less and no more than 45 direct jobs between Paris, Brasil, our external personnel, and all the indirect jobs at our subcontractors and suppliers.In addition, following a reorganization already in progress, the operations in Brasil are almost breaking even, and a new business plan lays out the reorientation of the business with solid prospects for growth for next year.Very worried for the future of our company, we ask you please to immediately reconsider a decision, which will turn out not only extremely negative for our and your future, but also for that of the world of free software in Europe.While waiting for your prompt decision, we hope you will accept, Ms, Mr., our sincere regards.

French is one of the easier (easiest?) languages to translate into English.
After the colonization of England by the French, the language was left with
many words which haven't changed substantially in meaning from the original French, enough to form a fairly complete vocabulary. In fact, one can get by
quite well in English without using too many anglo-saxon words. Moreover, the logical structure of the French grammar is a bonus for machine translation algorithms. It's harder to translate English into French, actually.

Its all on wikipedia laddie, look it up. Where do you think Great Britain got its name, from being great? Its Grand Bretagne, as in Bretagne, the northern French province. Most of the common words, for example anything ending in -ion is of French origin. England is indeed an upstart colony of France.

One, the Normans were of Viking origin and spoke a peculiar dialect of
French. Two, even if they'd spoken the standard French of the time[1], it and
modern French have had a thousand years to diverge.

Of course they did not speak modern French, but your criticism doesn't
follow. You might have a point if both French and English had evolved completely
independently of the Old French spoken during the Middle Ages (and of each other), but this isn't true even approximately.

In fact, one can get by quite well in English without using too many anglo-saxon words.

Not if you want anyone to understand you, you can't. Most English speakers (at least in California) have only the most guttural of English understanding. Words like "venison" or "grandeur" are outside their realm of "comprehension".

Vocabulary lookup alone isn't enough in general. There's no 1-1
correspondence between word meanings in different languages, but the
correspondence is strong when the same word occurs in both, which is
my point.

If you think about a thesaurus, you immediately see the problem with pure dictionary lookup in general. You can map a word to a general idea, but which word
do you output (in the other language) for that general idea? Also, there are ideas which exist in one language and not in another, so that's

It will be interesting to see how the fall into bankruptcy is managed. With the connivance of the right judge to set the right trustee, who relays to one side what the Russian partners bid is, so it can be slightly beaten, then the Greenberg faction will own it all. Even if they pay a high bid, since Greenberg will win they will get most of the money back after paying creditors, and they will have control of whatever is paid and they can quickly divert the kitty to themselves by well known legal methods.

The problem here is that so many distributions are high-quality and free that these days, you need to offer something extra in order to either excite people into using and coding to support your distro and creating hype and popularity or giving them enough in support to encouraged a paid-for environment that works. With Ubuntu, it's been usability...it's such a far-reaching and diverse distro with several major window managers offered that it covers a lot of ground -- and handing out disks for free way back

look guy, this is not what happened. just take a few minutes and read the article. its not about products, its not about business models. its about one gangster mowing down a bunch of innocent people, robbing them, taking their money, and selling their clothes for a profit.

this child like fairyland view of how high-stakes capitalism works: "build a good product, people will buy it, therefore if you go bankrupt, your product must have been bad", is just absolutely hilarious, and sad.

I have been with Mandriva since version 9, it was the distro I picked which got me into Linux, so have been with the distro for a lot of years now. However since the beta of Mageia 1 came out, I jumped ship - I didn't want to deal with Mandriva's new menu system for a start.

The problem I see with a shareholder revolt is, the company should have found a way to not fire their main developers in the first place. Now they are working on the community Mageia Linux [mageia.org] version, and who is left at Mandriva?

IMO if they wanted a better distro, you should get more people to bother to report bugs so they can be investigated, not think someone else has found it. This should be made easy for non technical users so that others with more experience may try re-creating the bug. The various distro webpages to report a bug are way over the top for a new person to understand and report a bug.

I myself among now lots of others reported various Nouveau free nVidia driver [freedesktop.org] issues where there are problems if you want to switch to the real nVidia driver to get 3D. Stuff like Compiz, Google Earth, or BZFlag won't work with the Nouveau driver.... but 2D stuff works fine with Nouveau.

This has been the history of Mandriva, originally Mandrake. And, it isn't because of being a desktop distro, but because management decisions at critical points of its life (or would that be mis-management decisions). Anyway, it does appear that this time, the large beast is in its final death throws.

all of the threads complaining about how it was not a profitable company, etc, are wrong. this guy has hit the nail on the head. capitalism doesnt care if you are profitable, it only cares if you could be sold off for MORE profit than you are making.

the personal profit of a very powerful group is often behind these things. its the whole point of corporate raiding. 'mergers and acquisitions'. private equity firms.

the 'linux companies' are not competing on quality, they are competing on who can survive the mo

And you just hit the nail on the head on why there aren't any Linux desktops that can compete with the polish and intuitiveness of OSX and Windows. to bring Linux up to that level would cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollar because the only way to herd developers is by paying them, otherwise you get what you have now with everyone scratching their own personal itches and then none of the "busted shitters" as i call them get fixed. When folks are doing work for free they are gonna do what they consider fun, nobody wants to be the guy that goes and fixes the busted shitters. just look at how many bugs on canonical is over two years, over three, i think the oldest ones are going on six years now because nobody wants the shitty jobs so they just don't get done.

Well when you are building a consumer OS guess what? there are literally THOUSANDS of truly shitty thankless lousy jobs that need doing. there is bug fixing and QA and regression testing and making sure all the UIs match the OS standard and maintaining your own kernel because God knows when Torvalds will get an itch and break all your drivers and writing all the help files and documentation and I'm sure if i sat here a couple of minutes i could easily name a dozen or two more truly lousy, boring, shitty, thankless jobs that HAVE to be done if you want a world class highly polished OS where everything "Just works" and is so simple and intuitive that Suzy the checkout girl can work it. This is why Apple and MSFT pay a metric shitload of money to developers, because they won't do those shitty jobs for free.

And THAT, that right there, is the problem. Consumers won't buy support contracts so the Red Hat method of making money is right out and why should the OEMs pay you shit when they can just "pull a CentOS" and have the thing for free? Gotta look out for the shareholders you know. i'm sure dell threw a few bucks Canonical's way but I seriously doubt it was even 1/10th what they were spending to build Ubuntu. Has Canonical even made a dime in profit yet? and the much vaunted community won't back you up, just look at how ATI bent over backwards to open up their code, even hiring driver developers to work for the free driver group out of their own pocket only to have every forum covered with posts that read "LOL use Nvidia" or the simple fact that more than a THIRD of the webservers on the entire planet are not using RHEL but, survey says....CentOS, an OS created by a bunch of cheapskates that used to sell an appliance that required RHEL who said "Fuck 'em, we'll just cut out the copyrights and then we won't have to pay shit!" and now of course they don't pay shit, not when compared to the RHEL licenses they used to buy.

How many here have cut a check to canonical? How many have sent money to their favorite distro? despite the BS I'm sure this post will get i bet if you looked at the numbers you are talking maybe 1 in 10,000 if you are lucky. So don't complain when Linux on the desktop goes exactly nowhere, just look at how canonical is now gonna be selling some tablet starting at CES and is spending an increasing amount of their limited resources on the server. its simply because with the FOSS model there isn't any money to be made on consumers and if anyone was to sink the hundreds of millions required to make a world class rock solid picture perfect Linux desktop it wouldn't be five minutes before just like Mint you had a knockoff stealing all the users thanks to being 'free as in beer" but without the work and money required to bring it up to OSX and Win 7 its 'free as in worthless" and despite the modbombing i'm sure to get for pointing out the truth THAT is why Linux isn't gaining shit on the desktop. I mean when MSFT puts out a flaming turd like Vista and the OS with a $1000 barrier to entry gains like mad and the "free as in beer" OS don't gain shit, how big of a cluebat do you have to be hit by to see the FOSS model don't work in this case? Home users don't care about freedom or CLI or DIY they care about "its just works and keeps working and is easy to use" and I'm sorry but Linux is still a long way from that friends and I don't see it getting any better, if anything all the itch scratching by the DE devs has made it worse.

And you just hit the nail on the head on why there aren't any Linux desktops that can compete with the polish and intuitiveness of OSX and Windows.

And that's the fundamental flaw of your whole argument. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 are DIFFERENT, but they are DEFINITELY "polished" and very usable, even if you don't PERSONALLY like them. To claim otherwise is such biased claptrap it's sickening.

And you just hit the nail on the head on why there aren't any Linux desktops that can compete with the polish and intuitiveness of OSX and Windows.

And that's the fundamental flaw of your whole argument. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 are DIFFERENT, but they are DEFINITELY "polished" and very usable, even if you don't PERSONALLY like them. To claim otherwise is such biased claptrap it's sickening.

I think you missed his point - successful desktop OS are successful because they just work - Linux is not there yet; and there is very little interest in fixing things that keep that from happening. Linux is very much a hobbyist OS for people who ilk ego tinker - but most computer users don't ant to tinker, or as the OP put it:

Home users don't care about freedom or CLI or DIY they care about "its just works and keeps working and is easy to use"

Ad to that there is no money in making it just work - why should a Dell, for example, turn it into a viable alternative when any competitor can take their work for free? And so Linux languishes on the desktop; and finds its niche in areas where companies can make money.

I'd add to his argument that there is no "killer app" for Linux that makes switching from WIN/OSX necessary. Much of the effort goes to building free "me too" apps to replicate apps on those platforms., and in many cases those same me too apps are available for them, so why bother switching?

I think you missed his point - successful desktop OS are successful because they just work - Linux is not there yet

Funnily enough, I think he didn't miss the point. The "Linux is not there yet" poster compares later in the thread the whole Windows software package with just the Linux kernel (because Gnome 2/3 aren't OSes by themselves). Never mind that thousands of public administration and education computers in Spain run just a modified Debian (Linex -which is possibly going to disappear-, Guadalinex, Molinux) with no real problems.

Funny you should mention dell because they are actually a poster child for how broken Linux is a consumer platform is because Dell have to run their own repos [theinquirer.net] just to keep there teeny tiny subset of hardware from being shat on when the devs scratch their itches. I will bet my very last dollar if Dell will publish their numbers (which they won't BTW, I even asked them out of curiosity and they won't give you the numbers) that Dell is LOSING money on Ubuntu because the costs of keeping a dev team to do nothin

Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy

It's even simpler. Kids from 6 years old up, hospital workers, administration workers are using Linux in Spain by the thousands and they have no problems. Your Suzy checkout girl doesn't _want_ to change from what she knows. I can understand that, even if I find it annoying.

And if you need over a hundred million (I'll assume dollars) to get that "polish" I hope you don't work as a programmer. It's being done once and again for much less.

Polish doesn't mean glossy. It means that if something worked w/ previous versions of a distro, it should work w/ the current one as well, unless there has been some major changes in the OS, like the move from Windows ME to XP, or from win32 to win64.

With Linux, here are a bunch of problems which is what's being alluded to when one talks of polish:

No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certa

No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.

Do most users use several distributions at the same time? Because it is the same problem as dealing with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, or MacOS 9 and X, mind you. It is a problem we technical users have to deal with, not your standard user who, by the way, ends up doing the same thing everybody does: ask about their particular version of Windows and get particular answers about that version. Well, I'm fibbing a bit: the standard user often doesn't even know what Windows version is installed. I have lost co

Its really simple friend, to get the level of polish required to make Linux work on the desktop, where suzy the checkout girl won't have to learn bash or how to navigate a CLI when things break, where frankly things WON'T break in the first place, is gonna cost north of a hundred million easy and the FOSS model simply won't allow you to make that amount in the consumer market. Look at canonical, they haven't made a single cent, not one penny, on the desktop. if you figure in how much shuttleworth sunk in they have lost millions without a single dime of ROI, you think that is sustainable? in fact I'd bet my last buck that canonical will be out of desktops in less than 5 years, probably less than 3, simply because they won't be able to generate the operating capital. RMS may think you can have a utopia where everyone works for free towards the common good but that is a fallacy because we human like doing fun jobs and HATE doing shitty jobs and in the FOSS model the busted shitters don't get fixed. The FOSS model works in business because business is used to buying support contracts and they make money off their machines so spending money to make money is fine by them. the consumer market simply doesn't work like that and without the steady income you can't herd the devs and if you don't herd the devs you get what you have now, with bugs measured in years, updates that fix one thing and break three, hell I have Windows units out in the field that have been running since 2002 on a single install. can you imagine trying to update a Linux desktop from 2002 to current and still have it functional on the other end? it won't happen friend, hell take a distro disc from just 3 years ago and apt-dist-upgrade to current and watch things fall apart.

I don't doubt you, but if Canonical decides to go into either servers or tablets, it's over. In tablets, how many are going to prefer them even to Microsoft, let alone Google or Apple? And if they are going into servers, who in their right mind is going to prefer them to Debian (which is the same and where CLI is more commonly understood than GUI) if they're on Linux? And that's not even counting those who'd either use RHEL/Centos if they are non-Debian Linux, or either OpenBSD or FreeBSD.

Not had a chance on the BSD yet, I went nuts on the Steam sale and blew through 100Gb+ and for some reason the ISP didn't ding me so i'm trying to be nice and not suck bandwidth like a drunk at a free bar for a little while. as soon as i get this load of off lease out of here my supplier is supposed to bring in a nice selection of lappys and desktops so i'll probably grab one of each to just give it a more fair shake. As for Ubuntu, you don't know? look up "Ubuntu One" and "Ubuntu CES" to see for yourself.

I guess I'm an oddball - I rarely save either files or programs on the desktop - when prompted during installation, I uncheck both Desktop & QuickLaunch options and just just put it under Start> My reason is that if I have another app running full screen, or covering the required icons on the desktop, I'd have to first shrink it, and then get around. Which is why I normally use the start menu to either invoke a new program or open an existing document. I have My Documents, Favorites and My Recent

You think YOU'RE weird, I've been using this little program called popsel [softpedia.com] for years and years and just use it on any machine I use. I made three folders in my tool folder called "Popsel Games' and "Popsel AV" and "Popsel Utilities" and then cooked up three little icons, a red AV on black, a green G for games on white, and a yellow Util on blue and then I just have shortcuts to popsel pinned to the start menu. That way there is never more than 3 clicks to get to ANY app I use, click start>click correct po

I have both a Linux computer and a Windows XP computer at home and, for me, they both seem quite polished and easy to use. I have been using both for many years, so by now I am equally comfortable using either Linux or Windows. I see advantages and disadvantages to using either operating system.

Some past versions of Linux did have a few noticeable bugs or other problems. But, Kubuntu 10.04 seems to be working quite well on this computer.

Kubuntu uses KDE instead of Gnome, IceWM, Enlightenment, or one of the

The only way any Linux distro would be successful is if a computer manufacturer took it, built a set of hardware just for it, and then sold that entire solution as a system, w/ whatever software the customer wanted. Price everything appropriately - don't charge $500 or $800 or $250 per software, but don't charge $0 either. Offering package suites, where one can get the OS for, say, $50, or Libre Office for $40, and so on. That way, every bit of software is paid for, but is known to work, since it comes p

Thanks. Notice how many insults and attacks on me personally i got? One pretty much accuses me of being some paid astroturfer which if so i'm getting screwed because I haven't seen a single check yet, others actually have the nerve to say Windows isn't polished and neither is OSX (which if that ain't some SERIOUS koolaid chugging i don't know what is) and then others try to use what i call the "move the goalposts and I win!" argument by bringing up things that don't have shit to do with the subject, like Re

Sorry you and the other poster got modded down friend, but I intended and expected to be modbombed as i call it like I see it and truth rarely follows groupthink. The simple fact that so many here refuse to accept (Notice how many said "Windows and OSX isn't polished" which if that isn't koolaid chugging I don't know what is) is that the level of integration you are talking with Windows and OSX, where EVERYTHING follows strict conventions, like scrollbar goes here and icons must be like so and keyboards shortcuts should be thus, all of that COSTS MONEY because without it? You get what you have now which is rampant itch scratching. Just look at your average "consumer friendly" Linux like Mint or PCLOS. You have apps that follow the Mac way, some follow the Windows way, some go for the old school UNIX methods of doing things. There is NO consistency there AT ALL. Why is that? Its because the devs are working for free and frankly don't give a fuck about jumping through some hoop if they don't want to and because they aren't getting paid you can take it or leave it friend, because they are just scratching an itch, not like they can be fired for not following the rules.

Then you have the horrible bugs and driver breaking. Just look at the Canonical bugtracker where many bugs are measured in YEARS without being fixed. Some have thousands of complaints yet they sit, why? no payments to devs mean they don't want to do shit works for free, its simple human nature. if i'm gonna give up my own free time I'm gonna be doing something FUN and coding is fun, bug fixing? Not fun, not even a little fun, in fact it sucks ass. I mean when Dell, one of the biggest OEMs on the entire planet, has to run their own repos [theinquirer.net] because if they don't the whole thing shits itself and dies? You got serious problems friend. Why does it do that? Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find. Just for the hell of it i tried counting on the Ubuntu forum after the last release and I quit at over 700 and there were literally page after page I didn't bother counting. Now realize for every ONE complaint you probably have a couple of hundred that just got frustrated and either went somewhere else or gave up completely and went to Windows or OSX. One of the long time posters on LinuxInsider has been a Linux server admin for over a decade and she recently gave up and is looking at either BSD or Mac, why? because the latest apt-dist-upgrade wiped out her email and left her with a broken machine. Data loss in this stage of the game is unacceptable people!

What I'm trying to get at folks is the FOSS model works in SOME cases but not ALL cases and trying to fit the FOSS model into all cases is a giant FAIL and consumers are one of those fail cases. like I said consumers won't buy support contracts, so how do you make the hundreds of millions required to pay the devs to get the busted shitters fixed? you don't which is why we have the mess we have. mark my words in less than 5 years Canonical will be OUT of the desktops biz because they can't keep losing money and Shuttleworth made it clear there won't be any more checks. that's why at CES there is gonna be an UbuntuTablet and you see more and more spent on Ubuntu Server and by extension less on Ubuntu desktop. Everyone is gonna have to face the fact that the tin cup model simply doesn't provide the millions in steady income required to build a world class desktop and if you want to compete with Apple and MSFT

Why would the bog standard boring ass hardware that Dell uses, the same Realtek and Intel and ATI and Nvidia chips that are in more than 85% of the computers on the planet still break, even though these are well known hardware? Its simple because the rampant itch scratching of the devs from Torvalds on down simply are worried about scratching their own little itches instead of worrying about the big picture and what their changes do to the ecosystem. Go to ANY forum after a release and see how many "Update foo broke my drivers!" posts you'll find.

If you mean "Torvalds on down" as the people working on the kernel, you're barking up the wrong tree. It is very rare that any serious regression slips by on that level. Most of the problems Ubuntu have had are because of the poorly tested software stack they put on top, like for example PulseAudio or NetworkManager, that broken Bluetooth stack and so on. Of course it makes little difference to the end user, but there's nothing the kernel can do if it never actually sends the audio to the hardware or goes in an infinite loop, UI settings are ignored or set wrong or it's a user space driver that is borked. In fact, the problem is that they don't have a Torvalds who give them the hairdryer treatment when they generate crap and break things that used to be working, because they don't report to him at all. I do agree that the integration tests are lacking, there's not nearly enough testing all the way from UI to hardware doing what it should. But the lowest part of that stack that Linus manages is the one that gives the least grounds for concern.

I mentioned Linus not because i think the man is doing a bad job, although I do disagree on the subject of an ABI because the rest of the OSes have had them for nearly a decade and their drivers don't break nearly as often, no why I mention Torvalds is if I had put in that many years and had MY name attached to something they keep royally fucking up? Man I would be PISSED with a capital P!

Lets face it if Linus was to have a royal shitfit, put his foot down and say "Look, I'm REALLY tired of you taking my ha

Sorry you and the other poster got modded down friend, but I intended and expected to be modbombed as i call it like I see it and truth rarely follows groupthink. The simple fact that so many here refuse to accept (Notice how many said "Windows and OSX isn't polished" which if that isn't koolaid chugging I don't know what is) is that the level of integration you are talking with Windows and OSX, where EVERYTHING follows strict conventions, like scrollbar goes here and icons must be like so and keyboards shortcuts should be thus, all of that COSTS MONEY because without it? You get what you have now which is rampant itch scratching. Just look at your average "consumer friendly" Linux like Mint or PCLOS. You have apps that follow the Mac way, some follow the Windows way, some go for the old school UNIX methods of doing things. There is NO consistency there AT ALL. Why is that? Its because the devs are working for free and frankly don't give a fuck about jumping through some hoop if they don't want to and because they aren't getting paid you can take it or leave it friend, because they are just scratching an itch, not like they can be fired for not following the rules.

Problem is that despite that cathedral model, things ain't consistent even b/w 2 similar OSs like Windows XP and 7. I had bought a copy of Adobe Acrobat 6 (the complete package, not the free Reader that one can simply download from their website). Guess what? I can run it in XP, but not under 7. And we're talking both win32 OSs here - I'm not talking about a 32-bit XP to a 64-bit 7. And unlike in Linux, where an app which one didn't pay for that doesn't work in a subsequent version, I paid for this app

MSFT changes driver models once a decade so you got 10 years and THREE OSes out of Acrobat, 2K/XP/2K3 which is actually not bad and if you bought win 7 pro which since you are using Acrobat I'd assume you're a pro that means you could STILL run Acrobat under XP Mode, which is a 100% free copy of XP in a VM provided to you for buying XP. As for your monopoly the Win9X memory management frankly didn't exist and made coders lazy as they could trample on other processes without trouble and 2K/XP finally killed